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They are probably having a water leak, not a meltdown. Water is only used for heat exchange, not for reactor control
That said, a major water leak from one of those places is not a good thing. The water from one of these places is very poisonous.
From what was said on NPR, the back up generators to cool the reactor failed and they only have between five and eight hours of back up batteries.
The need some good old reliable generators powered by petrochemicals --shocker.
The need some good old reliable generators powered by petrochemicals --shocker.
Q&A: What's happening at Japanese nuclear plants? - latimes.com
What happened?
Shaking from the magnitude 8.9 quake caused the reactors' control rods to be inserted into the core, a safety precaution that shut down the reactors' ability to generate electricity. The cores remained very hot, however, and would boil away all the cooling water within an hour unless the water were continuously circulating through the reactors' cooling towers. But the tsunami also destroyed the electrical grid that would provide power to the cooling pumps and disabled the backup diesel generators that were supposed to kick in if that happened. That left only batteries to run the pumps.
And they failed. Nature created the earthquake, man created a vulnerable reactor and flawed backup systems.
Maybe you oughta get a brain.
Operators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant's Unit 1 scrambled ferociously to tamp down heat and pressure inside the reactor after the 8.9 magnitude quake and the tsunami that followed cut off electricity to the site and disabled emergency generators, knocking out the main cooling system. Some 3,000 people within two miles (three kilometers) of the plant were urged to leave their homes, but the evacuation zone was more than tripled to 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) after authorities detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1's control room.
The government declared a state of emergency at the Daiichi unit - the first at a nuclear plant in Japan's history. But hours later, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the six-reactor Daiichi site in northeastern Japan, announced that it had lost cooling ability at a second reactor there and three units at its nearby Fukushima Daini site. The government quickly declared states of emergency for those units, too. Nearly 14,000 people living near the two power plants were ordered to evacuate.
Japan's nuclear safety agency said the situation was most dire at Fukushima Daiichi's Unit 1, where pressure had risen to twice what is consider the normal level. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that diesel generators that normally would have kept cooling systems running at Fukushima Daiichi had been disabled by tsunami flooding. Officials at the Daiichi facility began venting radioactive vapors from the unit to relieve pressure inside the reactor case. The loss of electricity had delayed that effort for several hours.
Plant workers there labored to cool down the reactor core, but there was no prospect for immediate success. They were temporarily cooling the reactor with a secondary system, but it wasn't working as well as the primary one, according to Yuji Kakizaki, an official at the Japanese nuclear safety agency. Even once a reactor is shut down, radioactive byproducts give off heat that can ultimately produce volatile hydrogen gas, melt radioactive fuel, or even breach the containment building in a full meltdown belching radioactivity into the surroundings, according to technical and government authorities.
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